


Frankenstein's House

by jaggedmountains



Category: Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Condensed Timeline, F/M, Gore, Mild Gore, Retelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-10
Updated: 2016-07-10
Packaged: 2018-07-22 15:19:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7444132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jaggedmountains/pseuds/jaggedmountains
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"All though the house and down the stair came this crashing, breaking glass, knocking aside books and cabinets, and with it all an inhuman howling, one of pain, and if the mother in Elizabeth was not mistaken, of fear and confusion. She took up the pistol and prepared to shoot, when a creature unlike any other burst through the kitchen door."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Frankenstein's House

Once, you would have seen the house as a beauty. A long time ago, perhaps not so long, the house was shiny and cleaned and servants made sweet and savory dishes in the sparkling kitchen. The windows were open often and the two children, William and Justine, climbed in and out of them and were scolded and went to play on the green lawn instead, explored the deep cool forest that the house’s hill rose out of. The shingles were a rosy matte pink that glowed through winter rain and soothed in summer sun. The parapet was roomy and cool and Elizabeth would sit with her husband Victor and read or draw or go over the finances while he studied his books and scribbled notes on crisp sheets of paper. The Frankenstein family had money, and they had friends, and they lived in this house. Victor was deeply engrossed in the sciences of the times; he brought home new thick research papers and pored over them until Elizabeth officially banned them from the dinner table and, in consequence, banned the children from Victor’s study so he got enough time in working and did not become fussy. The house was new and the study was exhilarating and Elizabeth enjoyed living with both of them.   
It was not long that they had lived there before Henry Clerval, a free spirit and Victor’s brother by adoption, came to visit. Upon arrival he commandeered every servant in the house to cook nothing but sweets, bestowed kisses and trinkets on the children and bows on Elizabeth, and then presented Victor with a chemistry set, bought with money from his newly successful acting career. The equipment was received with much enthusiasm, and Elizabeth wondered somewhat at this, for Victor’s interests had previously been much centered on the theoretical and more fanciful of studies, and not much on practical experiments. When she voiced this intrigue to him, he replied,   
“Why my dear Elizabeth, that is, indeed, garbage with which I used to tinker! My dear friend Henry has brought me something of much more value- he has brought me the future!” Elizabeth went back to her sewing, and Henry left, and Victor went back to his new laboratory and the future. 

As the years passed, Victor Frankenstein became ever more engrossed in his work. At times he would venture down into the land of his family and trade gestures and tokens of familiarity and affection with them, but soon a distant look would overcome his eye, and with a wild obsession he would exclaim,   
“Oh! Elizabeth!” or, “Oh! Justine!” or, “William! I have had the most miraculous idea! I have it! This is the piece of knowledge with which I shall solve my great mystery!” and leap away to return to the parapet of the house, which now contained his laboratory.   
William and Justine had visited once, newly upset at being denied their favorite play-place for purposes vague and tedious to them, and had reported it a strange room, full of metal rigging, glass jars, papers and small burning braziers, and did not set foot in again, for they swore to their mother that upon entering such a chill of apprehension had passed over them as to make a grown man look wary. Elizabeth knocked frequently, to entreat her husband to come share supper with his family, or to approve the letting go of most of the servants when Justine, and then William, were sent off to school. He did indeed express joy and sorrow when the children left, for he valued education above all else and wished his children to follow in his footsteps of science and the pursuit of the true nature of the universe. However William tested his father with particular aversion to that plan, desiring instead to look towards the arts as his uncle Henry had done. On one occasion, when the boy was home on a holiday, the passions of both Victor and William erupted, as water bursts from a stream dammed without release.  
“If you had, perhaps, clearly and without judgement, explained to me both the merits and virtues of your research into life and death and the according values of a performing life such as my uncle leads, I could have chosen to follow you!” exclaimed William.   
At this Victor sprung from his seat as if to make some violent gesture, then collapsed back down with an apparent exhaustion, and spoke so faintly that only the very keenest of ear might have caught it.  
“Ah, my son. Perhaps it is best you turn away from my interests, for see what it has done to me.” But as William leaned closer to catch the words, Victor spoke up,  
“But for your disrespect you are dead to me, and may stumble whichever path you wish!” At this William was greatly alarmed, and fled the house for many years. 

The children had been gone for some time, during which Elizabeth had become only slightly more aware of what strange sciences were practiced in the tallest part of her home. Victor often mumbled about species and races, and she often awoke in the darkest hours of the night to find him gone. These occasions she waited up until he returned, carrying bundles all wrapped up in coarse cloth, and often covered in grime and filth as though he had been rooting, pig-like, through the cold earth, and for having seen her husband thus, Elizabeth one night purchased a small pistol, out of the sick fear that Victor now did business with unsavory persons of ill intent. Despite his strange manner, however, she thought her husband did indeed seem something of happy, for when on rare daily occasion he emerged for food and drink he was bright-eyed and appeared as one on the brink of some great discovery. But this came to an end forever one dark evening, when the house creaked and harsh winds gripped the trees with unseasonable cold. Victor had been in his laboratory all day, and Elizabeth had gone to town but returned early in avoidance of a growing thunderstorm. As she made ready a small supper for only herself, the storm out of the paneled windows seemed to descend upon the house, rain lashing at the panes and lightning erupting, seeming frozen and then gone, in the sky far above. The sound of Elizabeth’s footsteps were lost in cracks of thunder as she threw herself up the stairs, to entreat her husband to leave his sorry refuge in the parapet and seek shelter, but she had not so much as raised a fist to slam it on the trapdoor above her head when a mighty flash of light forced its way through the cracks in the floorboards, immediately followed by a thunderclap so loud and near that Elizabeth found herself on the floor with hands over her ears.   
“Victor!” she cried, much afeared for his safety, and what responded but a piercing scream, a sound she had not imagined possible to fly from the throat of her husband. It spoke of horror and regret, and, imagining him gravely injured by lightning, she made to enter the parapet again when she heard a moaning that sounded not to have come from a man, and the harsh whisper of Victor, “No! No! Oh, a fiend!” Why, then, it must be that some evil person, some criminal with whom Victor had consorted, was here to pay him harm! Scarcely had this thought entered her mind when she found herself back in her kitchen, pistol in hand, remembering the words of increasing fear and agitation that had flung themselves after her descent,   
“Oh, I have created a fiend! Oh, what a monster! Unholy, ungodly! Let me look on you no more! What I have done?”   
There was then a great crack, and a great crashing and splintering, and Elizabeth jumped in fear and alarm, her blood pulsing as though it wished to exit her body! All though the house and down the stair came this crashing, breaking glass, knocking aside books and cabinets, and with it all an inhuman howling, one of pain, and if the mother in Elizabeth was not mistaken, of fear and confusion. She took up the pistol and prepared to shoot, when a creature unlike any other burst through the kitchen door. It was tall, near eight feet, so that its huge head struck the doorframe and seemed to enrage it further. Dressed in crude rags, little rivulets of blood hung off its limbs and body as though ripped from some great structure, indeed fine glistening wires still protruded from bulging veins and twitching forehead. There were snaps and crackles of lightning around it still, which illuminated in a kind of venomous halo a large wound on its head, as though it had been viciously struck, and the most terrible of all, the stitching! The being was held together, not by warm flesh and good tendons, but by lines and lines of horrid jagged thread! There was a look in its eye as though all it had encountered was too bright, too close, too hot, and upon seeing Elizabeth it fixed her with dark eyes in yellowed flesh, like some hellish parody of handsomeness, and started towards her with astonishing speed. In that instant all else became nothing, and Elizabeth fired the weapon once, twice. The monster howled but did not slow, and sluggish blood flowed much too slowly from the wounds as its massive hands locked around her bare neck and began to tighten. 

I know what happened then. I know, though my tongue was already bloated and purple, my skin clammy and cold with the sweats of death, and my vision ceasing forever to light upon the things I held dear. My husband Victor, reeling in the only just-begun consequences of his mad godless science, reaching the cold floor where I lay, the open door out which his creation had fled in pain and fury, and screamed and shook and held me tenderly and gnashed his teeth in remorseful tantrum. He murmured platitudes to my body and murmured childish queries to himself, saying,  
“and what of Justine? What of William? And Henry? What would I tell them? That their poor mother, poor sister has been murdered by a fiend?”   
But in no short time his unbearable sadness turned to uncontrollable fury, and the main door was left wide open and swinging in his reckless pursuit of his creation into the forest. In that time that he wandered the land, running towards his creature and from himself, many stories passed about the people he found dead, the people he found afeared, his savage obsession and his inability even to think clearly on what he had done. In the end word reached Henry Clerval, whose horse could not travel fast enough to reach the house, whose tears and retching could not be contained upon finding my crude grave, whose eyes opened wide and throat choked out fear as mine had when the monster, returning, found him there.   
Victor Frankenstein, following the signs and destruction left by his terrible Adam, reached the house in the light of midday, and the sun shone in harsh mockery as he closed his brother’s eyes, straightened the ladder, and climbed into the old parapet, his laboratory born twin to his madness. Autumn leaves out the one small window seemed the color of blood behind the cruel, broken face of the monster, who waited for him there and uttered nothing as Frankenstein recited the names of Elizabeth Lavena and Henry Clerval, lying below with bruised throats, Justine Moritz Frankenstein and William Frankenstein, grown up and away long ago while Victor toiled for a wrong cause, made not a sound until a hot bullet had entered his skull and his massive patchwork body had fallen, wheron he let out a sound like a sigh. Frankenstein did then what he wished he had done when the idea of creating a life had first entered his mind, and tore it to shreds, fisting soft organs and tough skin and hurling them to splat sulfurously against the already-crumbling stone walls he had erected, blood not of a human curling under his nails and pooling at his knees, he took a hammer he had used to construct a long table and destructed the monster’s pink ribs, wrapped ligament around his fingers for purchase and pulled, delighted at the ridges of a bare windpipe under his ruined fingernails, said, “See, monster! This is what you are! This is what you crushed in my beloveds! This is what you no more shall have! Frankenstein has beaten you! He is the victor!” He went downstairs and straightened the picture frames on the walls, and washed himself, and walked away into the surrounding forest.


End file.
